The Mancunians stomped 1st seed Loughborough 16-1 on Cache, showing impressive teamplay and individual skill and cementing them as a team to watch out for this season.

The NUEL CS:GO Winter Championship kicked off this Monday, but with all 145 teams playing 2 maps each you’d be forgiven for not keeping up with every single victory, loss and VAC moment. Luckily for everyone the Twitch stream did a great job of picking the best games to watch so that you can sit back and enjoy some of the best counter strike that the UK has to offer.

The second game featured on the stream promised to be a hard-fought showcase of technical skill between the University of Manchester and Loughborough’s ‘Lufborea’ who are making their return after having won the Spring Tournament.

The game started off strongly despite an easy pistol round win for UoM on T side. Lufborea were able to keep them honest with some impressive half-buy frags, even prompting a ‘ns’ out of them for a deagle put to use.

Lufborea lose the following two gun rounds also, with the second comfortably secured thanks to an impressive read by UoM player daily igl, allowing him to pick up a 3k on the lurk. Lufborea, however, were not deterred and decide to force up with their $3400 max round loss bonus. This time they win comfortably and build up a small bank, it looks like things are starting to go in their favour after so many close rounds.

Loughborough are able to defend sites well, trading frags and frequently getting the player advantage. UoM are simply too strong in the post-plant however, they win the following round and reset Lufborea’s economy. This is the point at which it starts to go downhill for Lufborea.

Manchester’s slow default style frequently rewards them with an early pick or two which they are able to convert by regrouping and pushing a site as a team. Despite their complete lack of executes, this proves to be more than enough for Loughborough, they have no answer to losing the opening duels each round. They start to get aggressive and change up their play style, stacking 3 in mid just as the caster announces he wanted to ‘show people Loughborough are fine’ after they lost their first map of the tournament. daily igl dismantles the gambit with ease, taking all 3 frags in the first 25 seconds of the round:

At this point for Lufborea nothing seems to be working – in desperation, a couple of their players start to push smokes dry, hoping to catch an unsuspecting UoM player and give them enough of an edge to win the round. In one round they win the opening duels and are facing a 5 on 3 when they decide to stick with 3 players on mid. A pick onto the A site from daily igl allows his team to walk in uncontested. They’ve been great at defending from the retake up until now but they don’t need to this time as daily igl goes aggressive and shows excellent mechanical skill as he cleans up the remaining players to ace the round.

In the last round of the first half arie of Lufborea gambles with another dry push and this time comes out on top but their lack of utility means UoM easily walk into B and this time Lufborea can’t even trade the frags.

The loss is all but guaranteed after UoM take the second pistol, bringing the score to 15-1. Loughborough force buy and face having to win 14 rounds in a row just to take the game to overtime. Once again they can’t win the duels and the “gg’s” are called as the favourites coming into the tournament are left wondering what went wrong.

We’ll have to wait until next week to find out if they can fix their mistakes and still make it into the championship bracket.

Until then, I’d love to hear your feedback. Do you agree with my analysis? How could Loughborough have avoided an embarrassing defeat? Maybe you just want to tell me that I’m a noob and should uninstall? Regardless, please leave a comment or contact me on steam.